Movie Review: Black Robe

The movie revolves around a 1632 French missionary, Father LaForgue or Black Robe as the Indians referred to him. He traveled to North America to attempt to ‘save’ the savages on the new land. I think he gets this whole mission from, as revealed in his flashback, another priest who claims to want to return to Canada to save the savages. This theory about saving people is an important job for them, what better wa

y could they serve their lord than to save more people. And so Father LaForgue ventures to the new world with his divine mission, which I can only see as a way to better himself in the eyes of his god and not really in looking out for saving the other people.

The majority of the movie however is devoted to the inability for the other to understand or even try to understand the other’s background or culture. This is evident in many scenes; one of the most evident is the scene when a group of Indians are trying to understand heaven, as Black Robe has talked about. The Indians ask Black Robe if there are pleasures like women and tobacco in his heaven, and Black Robe responds by telling them that the only pleasure they need is sitting and looking at god. Even for me that is hard to comprehend being brought up, as a Christian, and I can’t even imagine what the Indians could have been thinking at this statement. Ultimately, I can’t imagine the way that the priests viewed baptizing the Indians, to me they viewed it as tallying more souls to his name, and I don’t believe they really cared about the Indians. Because of that, they didn’t take the time I think that would have been needed to truly convert the Indians to Christianity. In the end, the only reason that the Indians converted to Christianity was because one priest told them that it would cure a disease or something like that. And being promoted by his own personal gain, Black Robe baptized them all.

First of all, it is really interesting to see all the similarities that the two groups have, when stripped of the primary things that set them apart. They both believe in some sort of religion, that when they act accordingly, they will be rewarded. The priests live their lives by pleasing their god in hopes that they will be rewarded in the afterlife, whereas the Indians conduct their actions to please the spirits and hope to be rewarded not only in their after life, but also in the next season or next year. The two groups also relate in their thinking processes, although the French would like to disagree. The French are thought to have had superior minds, and the Indians were thought to be savage, but they actually can produce rational thought, and do frequently. A few of examples of this is when the group of Indians is deciding whether or not to kill Black Robe, and the decision making comes down to the fact that it would bother other white men and may cause the group hardships. The Indians also show compassion, for example, when the group escaped the Iroquois, the chief told his daughter to let him come even though she wanted to leave him. I am not sure whether or not this is because of his dream or for compassion, but I think that it was a little of both. And one of the most clearly shown similarities in this movie would be one of the first sequences. The part when the two groups were preparing for the treaty.

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